Often, users who browse items (e.g., furniture) online are forced to make decisions about the items without being able to physically inspect the items. That is, the users are forced to ascertain qualities about an item without inspecting the item in context (e.g., in relation to the item's surroundings). Some conventional approaches allow overlaying an image of an item over an image of a room to simulate how the item may look in the room. However, the image of the item is often not visually congruent with the image of the room due to differences in orientation, lighting, sizing, and other issues. For example, real-time rendering applications are unable to simulate the full interaction of light (e.g., global illumination) with the item, thereby causing the resulting render of the item to appear unrealistic. Further, photorealistic rendering applications are often computationally intensive and slow making the applications ill-suited for low-power computing devices (e.g., mobile phones). It is to these technical challenges that the below approaches are directed.